Email marketing is a powerhouse channel for brands around the world, and the latest figures confirm it. The current year’s data from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) reinforces the expectation of email marketers everywhere by reassuring them that they will see an average Return On Investment (ROI) of approximately $40 for each dollar invested in their email campaigns. According to the latest batch of surveys and reports from companies such as Forrester Research and BrightWave Marketing, email marketing continues to be an extraordinarily efficient form of online marketing.

One of the most telling statistics is that while 15% of all brand online marketers allocate a million dollars a year or more to their email campaigns, the majority spend less than $250,000, with fully 42% managing to disburse under $100,000! When you consider that the ROI that even these smaller investments will produce can be in the range of four million dollars, it is clearly evident that email marketing is the choice of the insightful online brand marketer!

ROI by 2016 Will Be $100 Billion in the US Alone

The Forrester report extrapolates current US email marketing allocations five years into the future and it finds that the investment in this most efficacious channel will continue to grow steadily and powerfully. The report sees an increase in total spending on email marketing ballooning from $1.5 billion a year in 2011 to nearly $2.5 billion in 2016.

Investment in Analytics Will Double in Five Years

More and more marketers are scrutinizing and analyzing every byte of data generated by their email marketing campaigns in order to fine tune them even further, and this factor is clearly demonstrated by the report’s forecast that the budget for analytics will almost double in the five year span to a total exceeding $700 million. This is not only great news for the various companies who are in the business of providing analytics tools and facilities to online marketers and will see their market double, but to the brands themselves that will benefit in an even more disproportionate manner by being able to generate much greater sales volumes and profit margins by gaining a considerably greater insight into exactly what makes their email subscriber tick.

Email Marketing Strategies Must Continue to Be Perfected

These eye-opening statistics and forecasts amply demonstrate to brand marketers that email is the prime channel to engage a consumer base no matter which industry sector you operate within. It is imperative, however, to continue to exercise and perfect your email marketing strategy according to the key aspects of any successful campaign:

Creative – Your subscribers react strongly to aesthetic appeal, so the layout and design of emails has become a more significant factor than ever before. It’s not a matter of creating pretty emails, it’s the focus on usability and coherence to your brand identity that makes the difference.

Mobile – As an online marketer you don’t have to be told that by the end of this year, mobile email reading will overtake desktop and laptops combined. By harnessing the newest technologies such as Responsive Web Design, you can ensure that your emails will reflow precisely on any sized screen between 3 and 30 inches.

Social – Social media is becoming so thoroughly intertwined with email marketing that it is difficult to tell where one starts and the other one ends. Integration between these two channels must continue to become thoroughly seamless so that your brand’s marketing initiatives can be propagated by relying on the strengths of each vector.

All of the time-honored email marketing basics continue to be as important as they ever were. Segmentation is the basis of any successful email campaign as is the requirement to keep lists meticulously clean and business practices immaculately spotless due to ever-more stringent regulations around the world to ensure that email marketing remains the domain of legitimate and ethical marketers, not the criminal spammers.